


Requests from Gleipnir

by Ignicula



Category: God Eater (Video Games), God Eater 3
Genre: Daily Life of the Hounds, Gleipnir Bashing, Salt, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23906602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ignicula/pseuds/Ignicula
Summary: Hugo receives the next round of job requests from the Hounds' usual clients and notices a strange pattern in the way Luca's order of completion for missions tends to leave certain requests for last.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	Requests from Gleipnir

**Author's Note:**

> You can't honestly say nobody else here did this while taking the rank 7 missions.

Hugo had to say that one of the least favorite parts of his new job as leader of The Hounds would be the paperwork. Thank god he had a mentor in Hilda for figuring out how to do it, or else he’s sure he would have never been able to so much as escape the attempts of Pennywort to reclaim their contracts with shifty job requests requiring cleverly-worded contracts to be signed. 

Now they were flourishing. They were in the lead for research on ashborn aragami, currently the only group of God Eaters  _ or  _ AGEs able to exterminate them, and also the first to have even a slight solution for the ever-increasing issue of ashwrought and ash storm aragami. That wasn’t even starting on their completed research of the Acceleration Trigger, the testing they’re still doing on Core Engage, and the development of the Adaptive Armor for ash crawlers.

Having to do paperwork for these achievements was a tradeoff he was more than willing to make. However…

“Ugh… the Gleipnir requests are as high and mighty as ever,” he jokes to himself as he reads it. “Even though it’s a request they have to pay us for they’re treating it like an order.” 

_ Still, we have to keep on Gleipnir’s good side. Let’s just change the wording of the request up a bit so the others don’t get upset when they see it and…  _ He puts it into the computer. He’ll discuss with Luca what order they complete them in later.

He accepts a few more requests… Three from Hilda, a training request from Zeke for the newbies he’s in charge of, A few from the small ports around the ashlands that Gleipnir generally didn’t spare any time for…

_ There’s one from Pennywort. _

He considers it for a moment, his finger hovering over the ‘reject’ button. He’s about to hit it when the door slides open. His head snaps up and his finger slips to the side, hitting the button to accept it instead.  _ God dammit.  _

In the door walks a bored-looking Neal whose eyes stray over to the terminal Hugo is working on. “More missions?”

“Yeah,” He replies, “I just accepted the last of them. I’ll be talking with Luca about them later to decide our route.”

“Hmm…” Neal looks past him at the terminal. “Who from?”

“The usual.” Hugo replies with what he thinks is a perfect poker face. He’ll deal with the fact that he just accidentally accepted a request from Pennywort when he has to tell Luca about it. “Do you know where he is?”

“Last time I saw him he was sparring with Lulu.” Neal replied. “He, Claire and her were taking turns fighting each other, something about the dishes.”

_ So the winner gets out of dish duty, huh?  _ “Thanks.” He closes all of the pages he was on and signs off of the terminal. “I’ll have to go interrupt them.”

“Please do; Claire was eyeing up the flash grenades when I left. She really doesn’t like dish duty.” Hugo quickens his pace immediately.

Claire was normally very calm and reserved, but when it got to things she seriously disliked she was not above foul-play and he knows that neither Luca or Lulu are above retaliating. He doesn’t want the ash crawler to explode over a couple dirty plates, thank you very much.

He makes his way to the training room just in time to see Luca fling Lulu across the arena with a well-placed kick, Claire trying and failing to circle around behind him for an opening.

“Oi,” he calls to interrupt them. Luca blinks, but doesn’t break off the fight.

“Oh, Hugo-san?” Claire asks.

It’s all the opening Luca needs. The next second Claire has been disarmed, and from the way Lulu stops charging Hugo guesses that means it’s over.

“Looks like you’re on dish duty today, Claire.” Luca says.

“Noooo…” She groans. “Allow me to fight you one more time!”

“You still lost.” Lulu replies.

“I was distracted by Hugo-san!”

“There are many distractions in the field of battle,” Luca says teasingly. “You’re saying Hugo is more distracting than a charging ashborn?”

“Uh… well…” She sighs. “Alright, you win  _ this time _ .” Her eyes gleam as she glares at them. “Next time we’ll see if you’re still smiling.”

And with that she walks past Hugo towards the God Arc storage like an angry balmung. Hugo glances after them, wincing internally.

“So what was that about?”

“Oh, we all agreed to a match.” Lulu replies. “Since we’re on kitchen duty tonight, the winners cook and the loser does the dishes.”

Claire really liked to cook and really hated dishes. Now her mood made all the more sense. Although…  _ Luca and Lulu aren’t too fond of dish-duty either. I don’t think anyone is for that matter. _

While he internally celebrates the fact that they’re undoubtedly getting Oden tonight, he also has work to do. “Mind if I borrow Luca for a bit? We got the next round of requests in and I need to decide on our route.”

“Oh,” Luca perks up. “Let me go store my God Arc and I’ll meet you on the bridge.”

He nods, “See you there… Also next time maybe go a little easy on Claire? She really enjoys cooking.”

“Ah, that’s true.” Lulu looks a bit guilty. “I’ll go apologize to her. Come on,” She and Luca hurry out of the room after their blond friend.

Now alone in the room, Hugo casts a look around to see if anything was damaged. His eyes find a brand-new dent in the floor and he sighs.  _ Probably Luca or Lulu… I’ll have to remind them not to take it too far again, won’t I? No, wait… that’s shaped like Claire’s… _

Well then. He doesn’t want to think about how that got there and what was the most likely target of that strike. 

Trying to forget about it, he turns and walks out of the room, pressing a button to slide the doors closed behind him. 

He casually walks through the lower decks, knowing he can take his time up to the bridge. He gets the feeling that Luca will be a bit delayed in heading up to meet him. 

When he arrives, he heads over to the terminals on the lower floor of the bridge, typing his ID into the terminal to unlock the files and going over them one last time.  _ Ugh… Pennywort’s request… _

_ Let’s put that one on the backburner, shall we… _

“Hugo?” He turns around before he can finish that, spotting Luca’s approach.

“Oh, there you are.” He says. “Like I said, we’ve got the next round of jobs.”

Luca moves over to the terminal and examines them carefully. “Let’s do the requests for Hilda and the smaller ports first. They’re all closeby.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.” He brings up a map and puts an icon on each of the locations they were requested to go to. “The closest are the requests for the Chrysanthemum, and then this one Gleipnir asked about, for the Barbarius…”

Luca frowns. “Actually… I was thinking we could move straight into the smaller ports’ requests first. Gleipnir is a huge organization with lots of God Eaters and AGEs, so their requests are never as urgent. The smaller ports would have already been waiting for help from Gleipnir for a while before sending us a request, so they’ll be in more dire need.”

“That’s true,” He agrees. “So should we go north first?” He traces the two requests. “If we go north, we’ll have two from the smaller ports… a bit further north is another of Gleipnir’s requests that we can get to…”   
“It’ll be faster if we go to this one instead,” Luca says, pointing to one due east of the second request. This one is the one from Zeke. “After that, we could head southeast and take on these five all at once, then loop back south to get the last few and…” his face twists, “...Pennywort’s.”

“That leaves all the Gleipnir requests for last,” Hugo notices. 

Luca twitches. “That’s unfortunate.”

Hold on just a minute… “Did you do that on purpose?”

“Do what?” Luca asks, squirming in place.  _ Luca you’re a terrible liar.  _

“The route you just planned leaves all of the gleipnir requests for last.” Hugo says. “With the length of the excursion we’d also be taking side-jobs, and I get the inkling you’ll put higher priority on those first.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…” Beads of sweat run down his brow.

“What do you have against Gleipnir?”

His eyes flash and he huffs, speaking before he thinks about his words. “What  _ don’t  _ I have against the…” He catches himself, pauses, considers what he’s just said, and closes his mouth. “I don’t have anything against Gleipnir.”

“You suck at lying.”

He sighs. “Alright, I did it on purpose. Pennywort was horrible to us, but they didn’t order all AGEs to die. Maybe thanks to Phym’s miracle that was resolved, but I haven’t forgiven them. After that, they can afford to wait a little longer than everybody else.”

_ Right… Aside from Neal, the one who holds the largest grudge against Gleipnir is none other than Luca.  _ “We can’t pick favorites like this.”

“Yes we can,” Luca replies, perfectly serious. “We already do it, don’t we? We completely blacklisted Baran and don’t even pretend you’ve been tossing out most of Pennywort’s requests since we started getting them because of our past. What Gleipnir did was worse even than that yet you still keep accepting requests from them.”

“They thought they had no other choice,” Hugo argues. “No, with that ash storm…”

“You’re forgetting the part they’re the reason that ash storm was set off in the first place.” Luca replies bluntly. “And then they nearly killed Phym and all the other AGEs to protect their own hides. They could’ve just evacuated.”

_ That… _

_ That is true, but… _

“Despite that, we still need Gleipnir in order to survive. To that end, it’s best to stay on their good side.”

“Doesn’t mean we have to leap to do their requests as fast as possible,” Luca reaches over and programs in the route, “Now does it?”

Hugo sighs and smirks. “I don’t suppose it does, but I suppose that also means we don’t have to do Pennywort’s anytime soon.” He proceeds to switch the route up to make sure it’s the very last request on their list and proceeds to steal Luca’s line: “now does it?”

Luca smirks. “Now you’re talking.” He hits a button to send the route up to Hilda for confirmation. “Any idea when we’re leaving?”

“As soon as Hilda confirms the route and the ‘Mum is prepared for departure,” Hugo replies. “So, who made that huge dent in the floor of the training room?”

Luca twitches, a pale look on his face. “I tried to goad Claire into attacking Lulu by telling her what really happened to it to make her makeup all watery. That strike may or may not have been aimed to kill.”

Hugo groans, placing a hand on his forehead. “Yeah, that’d do it.” He stands straight. “What do you think she’ll do when she figures out we put all the Gleipnir requests on the backburner?”

“We don’t have to say we did that on purpose, did we?” He asks.

“You don’t really think she won’t notice, do you?”

“...We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“Agreed.”

**Author's Note:**

> And thus Gleipnir and Pennywort have been put on the eternal backburner... may they never see the light of day again.


End file.
